Success Quote by Walter Annenberg

Annenberg’s line sounds like a folk proverb sharpened into a warning: the point isn’t just that greed is distasteful, it’s that greed is stupid. “I didn’t want to be greedy” arrives as a retrospective self-portrait, the kind wealthy men offer when they want their power to read as restraint. But the sentence immediately undercuts any softness. Greed isn’t merely a vice; it’s “a mark of bad character,” a tell that you’re the sort of person who will misread risk because you can’t stop grabbing.

Then comes the blade: “pigs go the slaughterhouse.” It’s vivid, intentionally crude, and strategically dehumanizing. Annenberg isn’t talking about animals; he’s talking about businesspeople who overplay their hand, investors who chase the last dollar, moguls who think the market’s appetite for them is infinite. The subtext is survival, not sainthood. Don’t be a pig because pigs get turned into product.

That framing makes sense coming from a man who lived through boom-bust American capitalism, built an empire in media and publishing, and later cultivated a public identity as a statesman-philanthropist. In that context, the quote doubles as reputation management: a moral alibi that also reads like a seasoned operator’s rule of thumb. He’s telling you that “enough” isn’t charity; it’s strategy. The real flex is not wanting everything, because wanting everything makes you easy to kill.